A (very) basic introduction to deep neural networks

Bryan W. Lewis

March 16, 2018




These slides, code and all materials can be found here: https://github.com/bwlewis/dnn_notes

Why is this interesting?

DNNs have been amazingly successful in some applications…

  • Superhuman Go playing
  • Best known image de-noising methods
  • Near-human-level image classification
  • Near-human-level speech recognition
  • Near-human-level handwriting transcription
  • Highly accurate transaction fraud detection
  • Improved machine translation
  • Improved text-to-speech conversion
  • Near-human-level autonomous driving
  • Ability to answer natural language questions

See also Elad, “Deep, deep trouble” in SIAM News (https://sinews.siam.org/Details-Page/deep-deep-trouble-4)

DNNs have spawned ingenious computing advances…


  • Portable, parallelized matrix algebra libraries and systems (Tensorflow, Torch, Chainer, NVIDIA cuDNN, etc.)
  • Serious use of modern computing architectures (GPU, TPU)
  • Wide use of mixed-precision arithmetic
  • Elegant, declarative, dataflow-based model specification (Keras)

And yet they are not without problems…


  • Sensitive to perturbation
  • Despite simplicity of building blocks, often end up complicated and very heuristic
  • Almost comically compute-intensive
  • Probably being over-used for problems they are not good at (over-hyped)


  • Difficult, voluminous literature to wade through, often in a specialized and not always precise vernacular

Szegedy, et al, “Intriguing properties of neural networks” (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.6199.pdf)
Ostrich image (c) Milos Andera, www.naturfoto.cz


Sharif, et al. “Accessorize to a Crime: Real and Stealthy Attacks on State-of-the-Art Face Recognition” (https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sbhagava/papers/face-rec-ccs16.pdf)

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/01/the-shallowness-of-google-translate/551570/

Examples of DNNs…


Supervised

  • Multilayer feed-forward (we’ll use this example today)
  • Recurrent
  • Convolutional
  • LSTM recurrent
  • Stochastic (RBM, other generative models)

Unsupervised

  • Autoencoders (basic, sparse, variational, denoising, …)
  • LSTM
  • Deep belief
  • Generative adversarial networks

Reinforcement

“A new programming paradigm?”

But this is somewhat incomplete…

from Francois Chollet and J.J. Allaire, “Deep Learning with R”


Now this doesn’t look that new to me!

Consider, for instance, good old ordinary least squares…

Model Data


Rows of X are p-dimensional observations of variables along the columns (aka ‘features’).


  • Sometimes, observations X are things like pictures or color pictures or movies–often referred to as ‘tensors’ but really simply n-d arrays.
  • The measured output y might be a matrix instead of a vector in some cases, and defined over a field other than the reals.

OLS


For coefficients W (‘weights’) in Rp
and scalar coefficient b (‘bias’),

A typical DNN


For coefficients W and scalar coefficients b,






So, maybe not so different after all?

Generic k-layer DNN definition



The σ functions are nonlinear; typically non-negative thresholding or sigmoid functions. Minimization of objective functionals like

are non-linear and likely non-convex.

Very often solved with coordinate-wise gradient descent (aka stochastic gradient descent).

A 3-layer example



Examples


See the (ultra basic) example R code at http://illposed.net/deep_nnet_example.r

Neural networks in practice are elegantly specified…here is an example model definition in R using Keras. 

model <- keras_model_sequential()  %>% 
  layer_dense(units=256, activation='relu', input_shape=c(784)) %>% 
  layer_dropout(rate=0.4) %>% 
  layer_dense(units=128, activation='relu') %>%
  layer_dropout(rate=0.3) %>%
  layer_dense(units=10, activation='softmax')

model %>% compile(
  loss = 'categorical_crossentropy',
  optimizer = optimizer_rmsprop(),
  metrics = c('accuracy')
)

This model can be trained on any architecture (CPU, GPU, TPU, cloud, laptop…). And, once trained, exported to any platform (server, desktop, phone, …).

Why coordinate-wise gradient descent?


  • Easy to implement
  • Easy to work with very large data

But,

  • Slow!
  • And can get stuck
  • And sensitive to tuning parameters

Other nonlinear optimization approaches in use


  • SGD batch variants
  • Accelerators like Adam (https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.6980) (quasi-Newton like, remind me of double-dog leg, etc.)
  • L-BFGS
  • Conjugate gradient
  • …

Typical regularization in use


  • l2- and/or l1-coefficient penalties at each layer
  • Drop out
  • Up-front data compression/projection

Simple, key ‘big data’ insights



Pattern Use
Lots of observations (rows) → empirical distributions emerge for each variable. The bootstrap, and in particular the big-data bootstrap (Jordan, et al.), batched methods, matching (Rubin, King, etc.), … Recall, for instance, batched SGD.
Lots of variables (columns) → dependencies emerge between variables. Dimensionality reduction, subspace projection, … For instance, dropout.

Crazy ideas?



Directly project nonlinear operator into a subspace; solve projected problem? (Potentially computationally more efficient, plus regularization.)



Error in variables models (non-fixed)? (Total-least squares like optimization objectives.)